Rabble Rousers

Webb is a talented historian who is not afraid to tackle big and difficult questions. In Rabble Rousers, he introduces a distinctive and strikingly new approach to the history of militant segregationists. The result is a major contribution to our understanding of the post–World War II South.

* author of The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America *

Clive Webb meticulously documents how white supremacists tried to crush democratic rights in the name of freedom in the cold war era, their racial terrorism encouraged by mainstream conservatives whose coded racist rhetoric pushed working-class whites to vote and act against their own self-interests. Be prepared to be greatly disturbed by this chronicle of a continuing problem in American history.

* author of Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign *

Drawing on a wealth of primary materials, Clive Webb has produced an ambitious, insightful, and dispassionate study of extreme opponents to the U.S. Supreme Court’s game-changing—and for many white southerners, appalling—decision in 1954 ordering school desegregation. . . .Rabble Rousers is a fine, if chilling, book and illuminates a repugnant aspect of civil rights resistance.

* Journal of Southern History *

Rabble Rousers succeeds in shedding light on one of the last of the neglected constituencies in the fight for segregation: the far-right fringe. Webb's meticulously researched study reveals much about the nature of the larger massive resistance campaign and, more important, highlights the forces that kept the white South from presenting a united front in the face of mounting pressure for racial reform.

Adds significantly to our knowledge of the far Right in the civil rights era. . . .Webb has performed a real service for the profession by wading through documents, speeches, and pamphlets that others might not want to touch, let alone analyze. Certainly it is difficult to read these racist, fascist, and antisemitic claims and not come away with a deep sense of disgust and revulsion, combined with a renewed appreciation for the courage and conviction of those who opposed them.

In his well-documented analysis, Webb argues that these five rabble-rousers ultimately did more to further the cause of civil rights than hurt it. Webb’s book is a compelling one, not least because the reader is drawn to see parallels between the past and present throughout the book. In the end, Webb’s claim that the five extremists profiled here indicate a deeper problem in the American political culture is convincing–both by the evidence itself and by Webb’s very nicely written interpretation of it.

* Register of the Kentucky Historical Society *

Webb's carefully argued and well researched work certainly begins to explore a new angle of the civil rights era that is in need of reexamination.

In one of the book’s most important contributions, Webb exposes the role of antisemitism in shaping the ideology of both the far right activists and the racial politics of the postwar South. . . . Rabble Rousers provides a valuable insight into the success of and limits to the politics of massive resistance and the extreme right wing.

* Journal of American Ethnic History